3

Funded

243

Minimum

382

Target

In the context of climate change and transition from fossil fuels, Phi imagines new ways of interacting with energy and proposes a digital jurisdiction for managing global peer-to-peer network of distributed clean energy infrastructure.

Full description of the concept

Can renewable energy provide an incentive for people to work together in order to face the Climate Change? Using a game environment to simulate future scenarios, Phi envisions a future where energy is no longer a centralized and opaque infrastructure but rather a collectively owned distributed network available for everyone who wants to cooperate in order to deal with environmental issues.

There is a relationship between value - what money is supposed to represent - and energy - how things in the world are made active. This link, between value and energy, becomes even more relevant if we talk about cryptocurrencies, which are digital money based on distributed databases (networks) called blockchains that do not require third parties involved to assure any type of relationship between users of the network (peers). Currently, most cryptocurrencies require the intensive consumption of electrical energy by computers called mining rigs to remain secure. In other words, computational networks index the consumption of electrical energy. This relationship between energy consumption and value production is the starting point for Phi, a project that imagines new ways of interacting with energy. Using cryptocurrency as an incentive to transit from fossil fuels to clean decentralized energy, Phi proposes to codify social obligation and trust in order to increase sustainability, responsibility, and transparency within the peer-to-peer networks.

So far we’ve developed a proof-of-concept simulation environment ( http://phi.zone/ ) where people can use a friendly chatbot to create clean energy network and play around parameters in order to increase the network’s coverage and health. This prototype aims to give the people a possibility to explore potential effects of decentralized energy.
For Drone Visions, we will develop a tokenized version of the simulation and install it at the exhibition place on two computer booths. We will establish a single-world multiplayer version of the game, where each player has a wallet and budget of Phi Coin to spend on infrastructure. The goal is to grow a global energy network that is communally owned. The main rule is to find an easiest and faster way to grow the network without compromising its stability, health and equal distribution of resources. Players ultimately have to make choices between maximizing capital gains, growing the penetration of the network, or securing communities right to remain ‘off-grid’. Being inspired by Buckminster Fuller’s World Game, our game structure is designed to encourage a collaboration between players rather than competition, which represents the core idea of the project.

Simulation environment gives people a space to create representations of energy futures, where social obligation, rather than the consumption of electricity, becomes the source of value and network stability. With our game, we are asking how blockchains may or may not enable resources to distribute along more equitable, peer to peer, lines.

About the group/Artist

PHI is a collective at the intersection of speculative urbanism and blockchain technology, formed by Cory Levinson (US/DE), Calum Bowden (UK), Aliaksandra Smirnova (BY/ES), Artem Stepanov (RU) and Yin Aiwen (CN/NL). The founders joined forces in April 2017, when they met in the experimental think tank The New Normal at the Strelka Institute in Moscow. The interdisciplinary collective networks through Russia, the US, China, and the EU, investigating speculative system design, media theory, visual communication and storytelling, software development, and architecture and urbanism. Currently, their work focus on the intersection between decentralized technologies and energy, and how to design a fair ownership model for sustainable future.

Budget overview

The most of the budget goes for the game development (design, software and smart contract development). We will be happy to share the budget with co-creators who have specific knowledge in those fields and are interested in our vision.

Details

Do you need electricity? Ideally, we will generate electricity from a solar panel as a part of the installation. Nevertheless, due to the unpredictable weather conditions, we might also need a traditional electricity source.

Will there be light? We will use two computers that will produce light, but our installation does not require any special lighting.

What is your audio footprint? Minimum. The players might have a conversation between each other, but we won't use any audio effects or music to not to distract the players during the game.